Our general principle of non-interference is always liable to be set aside on proof of the existence of a higher necessity for intervention than for adherence to our golden rule, and it may be contended that sufficient proof has been shown in the present instance. Whether public action is to be taken, or the matter to be left to private enterprise, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the Direct Route to India is one of the most pressing of the questions of the day.
When, in company with my fellow-passengers from Moultan, I left Kurrachee for Bombay, we had on board the then Commissioner of Scinde, who was on his way to take his seat as a member of Council at Bombay. A number of the leading men of Scinde came on board to bid farewell to him before he sailed, and among them the royal brothers who, but for our annexation of the country, would be the reigning Ameers at this moment.
Nothing that I had seen in India, even at Umritsur, surpassed in glittering pomp the caps and baldrics of these Scindee chieftains; neither could anything be stranger than their dress. One had on a silk coat of pale green shot with yellow, satin trowsers, and velvet slippers with curled peaks; another wore a jacket of dark amber with flowers in white lace. A third was clothed in a cloth of crimson striped with amber; and the Ameer himself was wearing a tunic of scarlet silk and gold, and a scarf of purple gauze. All wore the strange-shaped Scindian hat; all had jeweled dirks, with curiously-wrought scabbards to hold their swords, and gorgeously embroidered baldrics to support them. The sight, however, of no number of sapphires, turquoises, and gold clothes could have reconciled me to a longer detention in Kurrachee; so I rejoiced when our bespangled friends disappeared over the ship‘s side to the sound of the Lascars’ anchor-tripping chorus, and left the deck to the “Proconsul” and ourselves.
CHAPTER XVII.
BOMBAY.
CROSSING the mouths of the Gulfs of Cutch and Cambay, we reached Bombay in little more than two days from Kurrachee; but as we rounded Colaba Point and entered the harbor, the setting sun was lighting up the distant ranges of the Western Ghauts, and by the time we had dropped anchor it was dark, so I slept on board.
I woke to find the day breaking over the peaked mountains of the Deccan, and revealing the wooded summits of the islands, while a light land breeze rippled the surface of the water, and the bay was alive with the bright lateen sails of the native cotton-boats. The many woods coming down in rich green masses into the sea itself lent a singular softness to the view, and the harbor echoed with the capstan-songs of all nations, from the American to the Beloochee, from the Swedish to the Greek.
The vegetation that surrounds the harbor, though the even mass of green is broken here and there by the crimson cones of the “gold mohur” trees, resembles that of Ceylon, and the scene is rather tropical than Indian, but there is nothing tropical and little that is Eastern in the bustle of the bay. The lines of huge steamers, and forests of masts backed by the still more crowded field of roofs and towers, impress you with a sense of wealth and worldliness from which you gladly seek relief by turning toward the misty beauty of the mountain islands and the Western Ghauts. Were the harbor smaller, it would be lovely; as it is, the distances are over-great.
Notwithstanding its vast trade, Bombay for purposes of defense is singularly weak. The absence of batteries from the entrance to so great a trading port strikes eyes that have seen San Francisco and New York, and the marks on the sea-wall of Bombay Castle of the cannon-balls of the African admirals of the Mogul should be a warning to the Bombay merchants to fortify their port against attacks by sea, but act as a reminder to the traveler that, from a military point of view, Kurrachee is a better harbor than Bombay, the approach to which can easily be cut off, and its people starved. One advantage, however, of the erection of batteries at the harbor‘s mouth would be, that the present fort might be pulled down, unless it were thought advisable to retain it for the protection of the Europeans against riots, and that in any case the broad space of cleared ground which now cuts the town in half might be partly built on.
The present remarkable prosperity of Bombay is the result of the late increase in the cotton-trade, to the sudden decline of which, in 1865 and 1866, has also been attributed the ruin that fell upon the city in the last-named year. The panic, from which Bombay has now so far recovered that it can no longer be said that she has “not one merchant solvent,” was chiefly a reaction from a speculation-madness, in which the shares in a land-reclamation company which never commenced its operations once touched a thousand per cent., but was intensified by the passage of the English panic-wave of 1866 across India and round the world.
Not even in Mississippi is cotton more completely king than in Bombay. Cotton has collected the hundred steamers and the thousands of native boats that are anchored between the Apollo Bunder and Mazagon; cotton has built the great offices and stores of seven and eight stories high; cotton has furnished the villas on Malabar Hill, that resemble the New Yorkers’ cottages on Staten Island.